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Multi-Vendor IT Sourcing, Avoid Management Pitfalls
By Chuck Rosenfield, Senior Consultant, Alsbridge, Inc.

Decision making on a company’s IT sourcing comes down to the respective strengths exhibited by responding providers.  While a total outsource of IT operations involves core and non-core infrastructure, applications maintenance and development, customers discover that one provider’s strength is another’s weakness and vice versa. 

Further, applications are often awarded to more than one provider to leverage experience, business and regional strengths.  Desktop maintenance may even be sourced by the outsourcing provider to a partner to expand its breadth of delivery capability, or the provider may manage the company’s agreements only to replace them if they acquire better pricing and service delivery. In today’s environment, cloud services do not have to reside with a company’s current outsourcing partner.
Procurement departments are challenged to negotiate lower prices and therefore may attempt to achieve price savings through multi-vendor sourcing. However, the cost may be greater in the long run taking into consideration risk, complexity and greater internal cost to manage the agreements. Still, many companies source their IT operations to more than one provider and successfully execute. The key is to avoid the common pitfalls of vendor management.

This article lists some of the reasons for successful multi-vendor IT sourcing.

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